Except that this whole "fake animal rescue" industry is deeply tied to the "paid animal torture" industry (which already has patreon-style facebook groups). It's the same people recording the videos - just two different types of content that they make. I provide links and some explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28350858

I think the idea that subscription based monetization would turn out better is wishful thinking. What will prevent people from making channels of this horrible videos and get paying customers? Or what makes you think people will pay for educational videos more?

People subscribe to reality TV channels and plenty of guilty pleasures. OnlyFans is booming and so forth.

You may be correct, but I would love to see anything besides our wishful thinking that this would necessarily breed better content.

I wonder what a Twitch-like model would look like if subscriptions were 10-25x lower (~$.40) so that you could support a handful of your favorite creators without breaking the bank. I bet a system like that would scale better globally.

If a YouTuber uses Patreon only, does that mean they don't get checks? Or they just don't apply for the sweet free monies? (Or are their followings so small they don't qualify?)

Some channels such as No Clip (games documentaries) run with no adverts and only make money through Patreon. They have almost 650k subscribers and 45.5 million views, so they’re explicitly doing it to be ad-free.

Yes, but I'd say that's true for everything on the web. Advertisement is like a reverse Midas touch. Everything relying on it is on a race to the bottom.

> Advertisement is like a reverse Midas touch. Everything relying on it is on a race to the bottom.

Not necessarily though - I can think of plenty of partially ad-supported media and publications that have retained their reputation for quality for decades or even centuries, for example, The Economist and the BBC World Service News channel.

...the thing is that the aforementioned don't generally run mass-market ads: the kinds of ads you see in the Economist or in-between World Service news segments is stuff like Rolex watches, Credit Suisse, and Chase Private Client Banking.

The two examples you chose, demonstrate the opposite of your point.

One is a subscription service, meaning they aren't reliant on their advertising for most of the finances.

The other is a quasi-govt entity, whose funding comes substantially from a tv license fee.

The BBC as a whole, yes - but “BBC Worldwide”: the arm that runs the World Service channel and foreign broadcasting is self-sufficient and does run ads. Though I’m unsure how the accounting works for profits it gets for programs it licenses out when they’re made by the BBC’s domestically funded divisions.

Yeah, those are the exceptions, though, and god knows how long they're gonna last. The effect of algorithmic advertisement and pay-per-impression/click is visible even on reputable newspapers: lots of them are resorting to clickbait because that's what generates pageviews.

Are they the exception to the rule? It's not like The Economist is free.